Take only photos, leave only burnt out skeletal husks
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With nuclear reactors, there are ways to build them where that isn’t a problem.
Having said that, the Deutscher Feuerwehrverband (DFV, Association of German Fire Brigades), after conducting numerous experiments, has published advice stating that the risks presented by electric vehicles are not substantially different from those of gasoline-powered cars – both are just as likely (or in fact, Hollywood notwithstanding, unlikely) to catch on fire during an accident, or for that matter spontaneously. In particular, it proved impossible to set an undamaged electric-car battery on fire by applying heat from the outside; the dreaded “thermal runaway” required the battery to be severely deformed first, and that is something car manufacturers try to prevent by specially reinforcing battery enclosures and placing them outside the car’s ”crush zones”, typically below the passenger compartment.
Cars these days contain more flammable materials (usually plastics) than they used to, and that means car fires, when they do happen, can be more intense than in the past no matter whether the car is electric or gasoline-powered.
One technique that is actually being trialled is to use a ginormous fire blanket that will cover the entire car. The main object of this, apart from slowing down the actual car fire, would be to prevent the fire from spreading to nearby cars or other objects, which is important, e.g., in multi-storey parking garages.
The problem with that is that once the battery pack is warped enough to be in danger of igniting, the ejection mechanism will probably be too damaged to work, too. Also, car battery packs tend to be somewhat big and heavy. Exactly how and where would you eject a few hundred kilograms of burning battery pack without endangering the immediate surroundings of the vehicle, first responders, other traffic, etc.?
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If the battery pack is burning, that risk is no different (or even less than) the risk with the car burning.
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Guys, come on. He’s right.
Musk is a complete douche, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have 173k gas car fires a year and no one is freaking out about that.
But there are so many more gas powered cars, you say?
We have 1530 gas car fires per 100,000 gas cars per year.
We have 25 EV car fires per 100,000 EV cars per year.
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I get the dislike of Musk and by extension the companies he is connected to, but one car burning is not a sign that electric cars are unsafe catastrophes, as much as the petroleum industry would like us to believe that with their very predictable hyping up of every EV fire that does happen.
In 2018 there were 212,000 vehicle fires in the US, a significant decrease over years previous. In that context one vehicle fire of any kind doesn’t tell us much.
If someone can come up with a number of fires per billion miles travelled in EVs vs ICE vehicles, that’s something to discuss. Otherwise this is just another information free internet dogpile.
Musk is a dick and I don’t and won’t likely ever own a Tesla. But I am pro-EV and hate this anecdata bullshit that gets broadcast every time there is an issue with an EV of any build.
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I believe you owe me a beer.
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The same is true of e-bikes and e-scooters, they should not be charged inside a house, a shed or a garage, instead somewhere like a covered lean-to by the side of the house.
Although, having said that, due to the fact that so many houses in America are pretty much all timber with tar-paper or wood shingles on the roof, a small metal shed well away from anything flammable would be better.
A person died trying to escape from a fire several floors up in a block of flats in Bristol recently, the cause is believed to be due to an e-scooter catching fire.
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Might not be an Elon fanboi, could just be an electric car fan.
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What would be relevant would be a histogram of vehicle fires by model year. There isn’t an EV control group for 1968 Chevy Camaros with Webber carbs that leak gas at idle.
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I dunno how the Germans proved to themselves that exothermic thermal runaway is impossible in cars… but in the BESS biz (large scale battery energy storage systems) our main test is called UL 9540A, and it literally requires applying heat to cells, modules, and installations externally until they go into exothermic thermal runaway. Cells can have runaway problems at any time - some get “infant mortality” but there’s also a very good chance of that happening as they age, say thousands of cycles in. Since the packs are between the 4 wheels, I can’t imagine them not being able to put the car into thermal runaway by heating it from below.
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Of course they do. But at least there’s a fighting chance of putting the fire out with a fire extinguisher.
With a Li-ion battery fire, the best option is flying a water-filled 40-foot container over the car with a Sky-Crane helicopter and dropping it on the top, and waiting for the fire to melt through the bottom - instant immersion heater!
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So, I mean, fair enough. I’m curious though. It seems like the implication here is more that EV fires – or at least Tesla ones – are much worse. I assume those stats include cars that caught fire but weren’t completely destroyed, let alone took hours and literal tons of water to contain. Even when you look up pictures of cars that were burned to husks they often have frames and paint left. How do things compare in that regard?
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What if the carbecue is in the middle of a parking lot, surrounded by ICE cars? Does it get hot enough to ignite those?
Sure, sounds like facts worth exploring.
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Yes, but a fire in an ICE, if not contained quickly will spread to neighbouring cars, and turn the place to a raging inferno. That happened a while ago, one car caught fire, and spread right through one floor of a multi-storey car park, destroying a lot of vehicles. As has been pointed out, all cars have lots of highly inflammable materials inside, mostly made from petro-chemical products. In an open air car park, there’s a better chance of being able to move neighbouring vehicles away more quickly. There’s also less of a chimney effect in the open, in a building air will get sucked in between the floors, exacerbating the fire.
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Obligatory. 
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That number claiming that 1.5% of all ICE cars catch fire every year seemed a little suspect to me, and apparently it’s not correct. The real number is probably about 0.04%:
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It’s a veritable fire sale!
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Why on earth would you try to get underneath it?
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Hey, no kinkshaming.
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